Emails have become a ubiquitous communication tool for business and individuals alike. As the popularity of emailing increases, the volume and variety of emails received by an entity (such as a business or an individual) correspondingly increase. To assist the recipient, email systems nowadays may employ email handling policies to automate the handling of incoming emails. For example, incoming emails may be inspected in accordance with implemented email handling policies to filter out undesirable traffic (such as spam), to remove virus, and/or to identify certain emails for special handling, etc.
Complex email handling policies may be implemented using one or more email gateways. Each gateway encodes a set of business logic for handling the incoming emails. For certain email systems, the email handling policies may be quite complex, requiring a substantial amount of effort to setup, debug, and maintain the software, hardware, and business logic configurations and settings. Once the email handling policies are set up, email administrators are often reluctant to make changes to the implemented email handling policies.
However, as email systems and the emails themselves evolve, existing email handling policies need to be updated and/or supplemented from time to time. The deployment of new email handling polices ensure, for example, that a newly discovered email threat is properly screened before such threat can wreak havoc on the recipient's computer system. If email administrators are reluctant to deploy new email handling policies and features because of the risk and/or the substantial amount of work involved in integrating new email handling policies and features into the existing gateway infrastructure, or in migrating existing email handling polices onto a new gateway infrastructure, the integrity of the email system may be compromised and/or the functionality of the email system may be unnecessarily limited over time.
To encourage the adoption of new email handling policies and features, methods and arrangements are proposed herein to facilitate the deployment of new email handling policies and features without requiring a substantial amount of work to reconfigure the existing email handling policies and/or existing email gateway infrastructure.